When Nature Goes Big
We must let the wild world reach its full potential
Every once in a while, in this highly diminished world of ours, one comes across something in nature that has been allowed to reach its full potential. It’s happened to me in the Singer Tract of Mississippi where the sewing machine giant had deeded a swath of cypress to the state and since then the trees have just grown and grown. It happened again on the edge of a marine protected area off California where halibut the size of picnic tables eased right up to the preserve’s edge. It even happened to me just a day’s drive from my home in New York City, on an Adirondack lake private owners had left to conservation. Trolling it with a spoon to catch a specimen for a local aquarium produced lake trout after lake trout, each of which would have bulged the eyes of any angler.
We need bigness all around us. We need it not just for maintaining environmental equilibrium. We need it to remind us of our own relative smallness
But my most recent encounter with nature’s bigness happened when I stumbled upon a life form this summer so common that it never had occurred to me how incorrectly I had perceived its potential. I was passing from the Isle of Mull in Scotland toward Inverness. Along…
